After America (72 page)

The storm seemed to emphasize his point by unleashing a cannonade of thunder and lightning at that moment.

“How far is the nearest town or settlement; do we know?” Miguel asked. A cold breeze started up, bending long stalks of grass and a few scattered saplings to the west as the giant cell began to draw air into itself, as if to fill its lungs. The cattle, he noticed, had picked up their pace, trotting now, to match the increased urgency of their protesting calls.

“There is nothing close, nothing on high ground for a good twelve or thirteen miles,” Aronson said, without consulting a map. “There’s a small crossroads village there. I don’t know whether it’s on the floodplain, but the land does appear to rise in that direction.”

He dipped his head to the north.

“Then we should hurry,” Miguel said, looking to D’Age for support. He often found the younger Mormon to be the more cautious and reasonable of the two, perhaps as a result of the encounter at Crockett. Miguel snapped his reins and sent Flossie forward at a canter to match pace with the herd and the other riders.

The storm front passed over the sun then, snuffing it out and causing an almost startling drop in temperature. The first real crack of thunder split the sky, and the cattle started moving at speed, the drumming of their hooves becoming a frenzied tattoo. Another quick glance across the vast, seething river of mottled brown cowhide and bobbing longhorns found Sofia and Trudi turned around in their saddles, watching the storm race toward them. His daughter caught him staring at her and gave him a thumbs-up. Whips cracked and outriders yelled, attempting to keep the mob together. Adam and Orin galloped past him, doing their bit. It was no small thing herding thousands of cattle that were already spooked and this close to stampeding in panic. He wished he was over with Sofia. And Trudi, too. She was unusual. Not at all right, yet he could not help but warm to her. The Mormons were good men and women, but by the Blessed Virgin they were a tightly stitched bunch, and Miguel, for all his own hard exterior, did enjoy the company of people who knew how to enjoy themselves.

CRACK!

The flash of lightning and the hard-edged peal of thunder were nearly simultaneous. He felt rain on his face, a few droplets at first but quickening to a downpour that slapped down on them with real force. He was drenched through within seconds by the cold, stinging rain. And then it stopped abruptly, and a sickly green light lay over the valley floor, flattening the scene, as though he were riding into a photograph in a book.

Uh-oh
, he thought.

The first hailstone fell as a single white rock, bouncing off Flossie’s sweat-streaked shoulders. He just had time to hunker down and cinch the drawstring on his Stetson so that it sat tightly before a huge white fist smashed down on them all, a sudden roaring storm of ice that slammed into the earth, raising a shrieking, braying protest from the cattle, and nearly unseating the rider in front of Miguel with shock.

The vaquero spurred forward at a gallop, ignoring the stinging, burning pain of an Old Testament stoning from above. He recognized D’Age ahead of him, about to tumble from the saddle. Flossie was streaking forward at her top speed now, and Miguel was drawing on decades of horsemanship to maintain his balance. He drew up beside the Mormon and saw the fear in his face, the terror of having lost control of a big beast, compounded by the pounding riot of the stampede a few feet away.

Yes, the cattle had gone over now. No longer a controlled herd but a fear-shot panicking mob, barreling forward, plowing under any of their own number that fell, their cries like the horns of a thousand ghost trains. Miguel leaned across the gap between his horse and D’Age’s, precariously teetering on the edge of his balance. He grabbed at the other man’s reins and took a firm grip on the first attempt, applying hard but steady pressure, letting the animal know that it was under the control of a higher power. Calming it. Steadying it.

The horse never slowed. It was caught in the flow of the great mass of flesh up the valley floor, but after a few moments Miguel felt its wild terror and abandon subside noticeably.

“Take the reins,” he yelled at D’Age, and for a wonder, the man did so, getting his own fear under control, too.

He tried to find Sofia in the storm, but there was simply no chance. He could see no more than a few yards in any direction. He prayed as he had not prayed since the murder of his family that she would be all right. Truthfully, he had no faith in prayer anymore, but the Hail Marys and the pleas to look after his only surviving child arose unbidden, anyway.

Without warning, the hailstorm transitioned to a ferocious downpour, and visibility contracted to just a few feet. A howling banshee wind bit down on them, blowing the gray sheets of water horizontal. Miguel could feel himself being pushed forward by the strength of the wind and water. It shrieked in his ears and lashed at every exposed inch of skin, burning like acid.

Even the uproar of the stampede faded beneath the monstrous assault of the storm.

He looked about for his dogs but could see them nowhere. He could see very little indeed.

He hoped they had just fallen behind, unable to keep up. They were well trained and would not have let themselves get close enough to be trampled, but he could not still the anxious rodent of fear he felt gnawing at his guts.

CRACK!

A fat white bolt of pure electric energy speared into the ground not fifty yards away. He was certain he heard the wet air fizzle and split apart a microsecond before the blinding light seemed to turn the whole world into an X-ray display. The crash of thunder was enormous, enough to swallow whole planets, let alone the tiny creatures running back and forth across the land. He felt the reverberation of the sonic boom deep inside his chest, like a cathedral bell tolling, making his nuts contract in fright.

A single longhorn peeled away from the mass and took off at a right angle to it. Flossie all but reared up and dismounted him, but at the last moment she veered and threaded herself around the moving obstacle. He flowed with the horse, gripping with his thighs. So closely bonded was he with the animal that he felt the ground change under her hooves. Her grip on the soil became less sure, and he looked down and saw that Flossie was throwing up great geysers of water as she hammered up the valley.

At the same instant Miguel heard the sound he had been dreading since the storm clouds first had piled up in the western sky.

The rumble of something huge chasing them. Something bigger and more deadly than a mere stampede.

A wall of water.

The flood.

New York

The flight of the Second Bomb Wing of the much reduced U.S. Air Force was largely uneventful. Ten of the B-52H Stratofortresses left Whiteman Air Force Base in Missouri just before sunrise, lumbering up into a low gray mass of rain clouds that turned reduced visibility in the predawn gloom to near zero. The bombers climbed high over the storm system, heading east into the sun. The mission commander, Lieutenant Colonel Andrew “Havoc” Porter, was glad of the cloud cover not for any tactical reason but simply because he found it depressing to fly over hundreds of miles of empty countryside and burned-out cities, knowing that down there the remains of millions of his countrymen still lay unburied, unsanctified.

Porter was not one for dwelling on the old horror. He’d met his fair share of cranks and obsessives in the years since the Disappearance, all with their own patented explanations of the cataclysm. The bomber pilot preferred not to think about it. That way lay madness, in his opinion, because if you could not explain why it came and went away—and
nobody
could—you could never be certain it would not return. Best to just get on with the task in front of you and the work of living in a changed world. Christ knew, there was plenty to be getting on with. Behind him and in the other planes, flight crews passed their time, prepping for the mission with computer simulations while nine other pilots like him kept their bombers on course at thirty thousand feet.

This would be different from their previous sorties over Manhattan, where they often loitered in the battlespace for hours, depending on the availability of a tanker, occasionally releasing precision-guided ordnance on high-value targets, usually at the behest of an individual forward air controller somewhere down in the meat grinder. Porter clicked his tongue—an old unconscious habit—as he thought of the FACs who went out into that fucking madhouse. You had to respect those guys. And girls, he reminded himself. Sometimes they deployed with small spec-ops teams, sometimes with half-trained, ill-equipped militia units. Often enough they were they only thing standing between a ground unit and total annihilation. It was why their life spans were measured in hours once they hit the streets of Manhattan. As Porter brought the wing around on a new heading, taking them farther to the north, he wondered, not for the first time, who the hell joined the air force to go get themselves fed into the shredders with a bunch of dumbass grunts.

Exceptional motherfuckers, without a doubt, that was who.

For him, the job for the moment meant little more than a numb ass and a sore back after flying around for a day or so. He didn’t even need to worry about triple A or enemy air response. But he wasn’t foolish enough to downplay the importance of what he and his comrades were about up here. Because of them, thousands of dumbass grunts lived when they might have died, and thousands of pirates and raiders got handed the shit end of the stick.

He grinned darkly behind his flight mask. If this mission went ahead as planned, there might very well be no more pirates left by the time he set foot back on terra firma. And how fucking sweet would that be? Those ragged-ass jumped-up motherfuckers had been given a free pass for too long now in the considered opinion of Lieutenant Colonel Andrew “Havoc” Porter. It was high time they learned New York was an expensive place to visit. And he was just the man to learn ‘em.

There had been some vintage scuttlebutt around the refurbished officers’ mess back at Whiteman before they’d suited up for this run. Lots of fevered talk about uncapping a nuke on the Big Apple, after all leaves were canceled and every crew hauled back. Granted, there had been some AWOLs who were probably making their way down to Texas at this very minute, but they could go fuck themselves and the horses they rode off on. They wouldn’t be getting their back pay updated. Only when the entire wing had been sequestered, paid—glory be!—and fed a rare meal of steak and potatoes had the pilots learned the nature of their mission. Nothing like it had been tried since World War II, and no one was quite sure if the weather conditions were optimal for the mission parameters.

Havoc thought it was probably going to be a bust. The rain in the Manhattan area of operations was moving into a third day of downpour thanks to a front stalled over the eastern seaboard. But what the hell? They were finally gonna be bringing some real pain for a change. And even if the primary mission parameters didn’t play out, the bomb bay of Colonel Porter’s venerable old
BUFF
was loaded with an altogether different but equally unpleasant surprise.

“Time to target?” he asked his navigator.

“Ten minutes,” said Major Chaplin.

Porter nodded and checked his panel. A small pocket of turbulence connived to buck the old bomber around as they approached the city from the southwest.

“Think this will work?” Porter asked.

His copilot, Captain Hernandez, put her thermos of coffee away and smiled at him. “What do you care? You got a hot date to get back to?”

“Seems like a waste of ordnance to me,” Chaplin said. “You know, in this sort of weather. I have to admit I’m not comfortable with our mission.”

“Havoc, this is Eightball,” the radio crackled. “We’re coming up on the target now.”

“Copy, Eightball,” Porter said. He waited a few seconds to see if any last-minute countermands came in from the National Command Authority. Porter didn’t much care if they flattened all of Manhattan with nukes or with conventional munitions. It was their job to kill the enemy, and he was fully prepared to drop every last bomb in his plane, return to base, load her up, and do it all over again. He did know, however, that the civilians who gave him his orders could be fickle and that there was every chance that having flown all the way here, they might just turn around without shooting their wad. Like that time he’d been sent out to scare off a convoy of illegal refugee ships bound from India to California. At the last minute, the mission was scrubbed and the refugees were instead met by officials from the Immigration Service.

“Eightball, this is Havoc,” Porter said. “Stand by.”

“Strike Force One is over the target, Mister President,” Colonel Ralls reported. “Orders?”

Kipper could see the satellite track on the main screen in the operation center, a series of green symbols with attached alphanumerics over a wireframe map of Manhattan. Cloud cover obscured keyhole imaging from orbit, but several Predators and one of the Global Hawks were down below the cover with their eyes on midtown. Bursts of pale green and gray light flared on the screen, and flickers of tracer fire zipped back and forth at odd angles between clusters of individuals all over that part of Manhattan. He wondered how the military sorted any of this chaos out.

In his mind he had drawn a line around the lower end of the island, from the remains of the Flatiron Building down to Castle Clinton, and decided that was the part of old New York that he needed. Pretty much the same amount of land the Dutch originally bargained for when New Amsterdam was born. From Central Park North, a huge wedge of land to which only display was devoted, there was silence and stillness. But from about Times Square south, block after block was alight with fire and thunder. Dozens of screens displayed the inferno, but on the main window wall dominating the center of the room, eight linked displays were all focused on a few blocks around Rockefeller Center.

“Shouldn’t the bombing already be in progress?” Culver asked.